fastest way convert tab-delimited file to csv in linux

Question

I have a tab-delimited file that has over 200 million lines. What\'s the fastest way in linux to convert this to a csv file? This file does have multiple lines of header i

Answer 1

• If you want to convert the whole tsv file into a csv file:

  $ cat data.tsv | tr "\\t" "," > data.csv
  

  ---

• If you want to omit some fields:

  $ cat data.tsv | cut -f1,2,3 | tr "\\t" "," > data.csv
  

  The above command will convert the data.tsv file to data.csv file containing only the first three fields.